Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.06: In My Mother's Skin, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, Les Rascals, and Marry My Dead Body

Not a big guest day - Lovely, Dark, and Deep director Teresa Sutherland was there to introduce her film but couldn't stay for a Q&A. In previous years I might have said something like, man, if I had a movie at a film festival and it had two shows a day apart, I'd be there for both, hanging around to watch movies, and so on. On the other hand, almost every flight I've tried to schedule lately has either been at a stupid times or ridiculously expensive, and hotel rooms ain't cheap either. Combine that with all the stories you hear about just how middle-class people in this business actually are during the strike, and, well, I get it a bit better now.

Next up: A Chinese Ghost Story, Booger, Insomniacs After School, Things That Go Bump in the East, and Devils. And because this took such an unconscionably long time to post (some early starts and work I couldn't just half-pay attention to), I'll drop two tentative days worth of "where to say hi" in that I'm planning to attend My Animal, Killing Romance, and Mad Cats today (4 August) and God of Cookery, the International sci-fi shorts, Molli and Max in the Future, Onyx the Fortuitious and the Talisman of Souls, and Suitable Flesh tomorrow (5 August), with Piaffe noted as at being least interesting.


In My Mother's Skin

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

The sort of horror movie that can frustrate me, personally, because I've got a brain intent on decoding its uncanny events and true horror in some ways comes from how it resists being figured out or assigned values. That's especially the case when they take place from a child's point of view, and maybe part of the point of movies like this is that the world runs on rules that one can't grasp when it's not just randomly cruel.

So it is here, in the home of a comfortable family in the Philippines as World War II stretches on in 1945: Father Romualdo and mother Ligaya (Beauty Gonzalez), children Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli) and Bayani, with servant Amor (Angeli Bayani) looking after their needs. A collaborator by the name of Antonio has accused "Aldo" of stealing and hiding some Japanese gold as he prepares for a trip into town, leaving the oft-sickly Ligaya to watch the children. As the food runs out, the practical Tala goes to search the woods, finding a mysterious building with a Fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) who sees all through the local insects, and offers some help - and though Tala is smart enough to know these offers seldom come without strings, the situation feels desperate.

There's a strange tightness to this film, with the opening suggesting a much wider wartime-horror scenario and both the question of the gold and Aldo's absence lingering over the story but not actively engaged with. Which is not to say that individual stakes are not worth one's concerns, just that they sometimes wobble - the mix of how even children must do desperate things to survive during wartime, the sins of the parents being visited upon them, and the war perhaps being smaller than the greater forces around it don't always gel into something that really drills into one part of a viewer's mind, unless there's a specific phobia of having insects burrow under one's skin in play. The film winds up trading largely on atmosphere.

Heck of an atmosphere, though: It all takes place in and around this isolated manor that almost feels safe but soon clearly isn't: It's not a grandiose mansion, no, but the ceilings are clearly too high to be in scale with Tala and Bayani, and one can sense that a fair amount of time has passed without Aldo's presence by how the characters have rationed the food down to the last sweet potato. It's just enough for them to have felt safe before the chaotic forces of nature and decay began pushing their way in, so that even without making it a classic creepy house, the danger of the place reveals itself. It's no wonder the Fairy is able to find an easy mark in Tala, as the film's designers make her otherworldly but vibrant, with Jasmine Curtis-Smith doing an excellent job of sweetly smiling as she tells Tala that this is going to cost her dearly while leaving just enough doubt and suggesting that she's a smart and responsible enough child to handle it.

That plays off a very nice performance by young star Felicity Kyle Napuli; she's got the lack of seeming sensible and mature but revealing innocence as the film goes on, which is often the opposite of this sort of film's path, where the unsuspecting heroine discovers inner strength. The audience wouldn't be with her if she were any sort of fool. Beauty Gonzalez seems to have quite the time moving between the weak but respectable mother and the moth-possessed monster.

It builds up to an impressively gory finale, albeit one that has me thinking "so, now what?" as the credits roll. Ultimately, the atmosphere and interesting images are enough.


Lovely, Dark, and Deep

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As a person who quite likes looking at the great outdoors but finds little to be scarier than being stuck in it, I'm an easy mark for movies like Lovely, Dark, and Deep, although it seems like few ever come up with a more interesting idea than making hikers have to deal with serial killers. This one, on the other hand, has some genuinely scary material that it takes its time unwrapping, and the end result may be the best thing the genre has produced in years.

After an ominous opening that explains why there's a job opening at Arvores National Park, we meet Lennon (Georgina Campbell), a newly-transferred ranger who has listed it as her dream job ever since she signed up. Many of the other rangers seem to think something is off about her without hearing the conspiracy-theory podcasts she was listening to on the drive in, but you've got to be kind of off to spend a month in a cabin mostly contacting other rangers by walkie-talkie, though her neighbor Jackson (Nick Blood) is very friendly. What she doesn't advertise is that her little sister disappeared in this park on a visit twenty years ago, and she intends to spend her time looking for any trace, and making damn sure it doesn't happen again when someone like Sara Greenberg (Maria de Sá) disappears from her party, even though head ranger Zhang (Wai Ching Ho) tells her to stay at her station.

Boredom and intermittent strangeness can make a person paranoid or give them heightened awareness of anything just a little bit off, but the trick with a movie is to make this thing that happens over weeks happen in days. What gives Lovely the makings of a nifty little thriller is that writer/director Teresa Sutherland believably gives it a jump-start, in that Lennon is already into a rabbit hole explained by flashbacks and a constant early flirting with the line between reasonably irresponsible. This allows Sutherland to go a good long time without really getting serious about its potential supernatural elements but keeping them around so that the last act needn't feel like a betrayal, and everything winds up fitting together with a little thought.

And even when Sutherland does open things up enough to hint that there may be a pattern beyond Lennon's sister, she's smart to present even the trippiest situations filled with unsettling effects, camerawork, and editing through Lennon's prism. That's great not just because it preserves ambiguity about whether this is something paranormal or just in her mind, but because it means that no matter how strange or unreal things may get, Lennon's obsession and potential ability to find a way to channel it into something positive rather than self-destruction is going to be at the heart of it. No matter how strange things may get, this is Lennon's story, and consequential.

That calls for a pretty nice piece of work by lead actress Georgina Campbell, who manages an impressive level of intensity and obsession even though she's mostly on her own and doesn't have someone else to inflict it on or be measured by. It's the sort of thing that could lead to a lot of gritted teeth or defiant exposition, but instead you get the feeling of someone who has become capable and professional as a sort of by-product of their mania - Lennon is going to be tempted by a lot of things, but isn't necessarily going to scream about them. Interestingly, the three biggest roles are different takes on the professionalism this job in general and the unique circumstances of the park require, with Nick Blood finding a way to jump from gregarious to curt when lives are on the line, and Wai Ching Ho not necessarily having something soft under Zhang's quiet and stern exterior, but perhaps surprising empathy.

(Mai Ching Ho is perhaps the movie's most interesting casting; an accent that implies she immigrated as an adult and appearances in Lennon's flashbacks suggests an interesting backstory beyond how her life intersects with Lennon's and reinforces an idea that these parks belong to and can be enjoyed by everyone that runs counter to a potential "keep out!" message.)

There's something unsettling by the time Lovely, Dark, and Deep ends beyond knowing what happened twenty years ago or during Lennon's first summer as a ranger that's kind of clever: By the end, it has quietly articulated how one can both love the great outdoors and be wary of it, even if that's not always what is going on up front.


Les Rascals

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Typically when one calls a movie frustrating, it's a negative, something said about bad craftsmanship, but at other times, as in Les Rascals, one can take it as a sign of just how well the film has one looking at the rest of the world. Even if you don't know the specifics of how mid-1980s Paris was priced for violence, or exactly how ascendant the far-right is there now, this film tracks in a number of ways, because the where and when of such events seldom changes the forces at work.

It opens in 1977, as Ruddy, a kid from a West Indian family, and his nephew Michel run into Ahmed and his friend ready to take their own frustrations out on the black kids, at least until the chase leads them into a back alley where street tough Loki (Pierre Cevaer) and his friends opt to teach them a lesson and the younger kids forge a bond. Seven years later, Ruddy (Jonathan Feltre), Ahmed (Missoum Slimani), now going by "Rico", and three other friends are calling themselves "Les Rascals", with matching jackets and the like, with "Mitch" (Emerick Mamilonne) a hanger-on despite his brighter academic prospects, but they're mostly just punks even if they exist on the fringes of actual serious criminals - at least until Rico recognizes Loki working in a record store and delivers a beating that puts him in the hospital. Ironically, Loki seems to feel like he had this coming for the sins of his youth, but his younger sister Frédérique (Angelina Woreth) doesn't see it that way, especially once a professor asks her to see grad student Adam (Victor Meutelet) as a tutor. Adam may be handsome and clean-cut, but he's also quite skinhead-adjacent.

One of the first notes things I remembered noting during the screening was that, for something taking place in the mid-1980s, it often gave off a 1950s vibe in the costumes, decor, and music choices, and it turns out to be a really clever bit of construction on the part of the filmmakers: Though much of the early going seems to be looking to trigger nostalgia, even if it's a clear-eyed one that acknowledges racism and violence, the filmmakers remember that the early 80s had an awful lot of looking back at the 1950s - this was the age of Grease, Happy Days, and Back to the Future in America and the French have always had a fondness for that sort of Americana, despite stereotypes otherwise - and the chain formed this way has a lesson about how some dissatisfied people are always looking back, but that you can probably follow that string back forever and not find a golden age. It's no coincidence that Ruddy's family is placing their hopes in Mitch, who is breakdancing rather than appropriating rockabilly; he's the future.

If the family has a future, that is, because Les Rascals is a ticking time bomb of a movie: As Ruddy finds himself kind of adrift - he's not a great student, isn't naturally ruthless enough to be a particularly effective criminal, and can't find a job until he's completed military service that gives him qualms as a black man in a country that hasn't put its colonialist past behind it - the segments with Fred are showing just how easy it can be to slip into radicalism - and how easily calmer voices can be discarded, considering how Loki is sidelined as an influence on his sister once Adam has his claws in her. There's a sense of the whole cast being funneled toward their final confrontation.

It's a nice cast as well, especially Jonathan Feltre, who gives off a ton of quiet frustration as Ruddy grows out of youthful foolishness but doesn't have an appealing way forward, and can't quite articulate how frustrating it is that his own mother seems to think he's hopeless and thinks less of him than her other son, Mitch's father, who is in prison. He projects a fierce but not necessarily virtuous loyalty, like it's the only thing in the world he's got to cling to. On the other side, Angelina Woreth and the filmmakers exploit how quick and easy an earnest young white woman can gain sympathy to create nifty moments of tension entirely built around whether Fred will be seduced by Adam and his way of thinking, hitting sympathetic beats well enough that one maybe doesn't realize just how lost she is until it's far too late.

This leads to a finale of often-shocking violence which director/co-write Jimmy Laporal-Trésor deploys ruthlessly, taking the time to sideline the characters who have no stomach for it on-screen, and while there's often tension, it's never exciting violence that feels like a way to prove righteousness. Indeed, as it goes on, anything like Ruddy swinging his fists, screaming at the person who deserves it, will be reduced in importance, and the politicization will increase, from skinheads attacking more moderate rivals to which bits of bloodshed get used for a narrative in the media.

It's sadly familiar, of course, even across an ocean and forty years. But, then, the good old days are always just one generation back, and breaking the cycle is hard.


Guan yu wo han gui bian cheng jia ren de na jian shi (Marry My Dead Body)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There's a really strong "sure, why not?" vibe to this that I really like even if it may be kind of iffy in some areas - it's willing to go for the joke and surprisingly good at selling it when it's out there. The high concept and the cop story don't really feel like they belong together at times, but the filmmakers execute well enough to realize that they've actually got a situation where people will accept "it's fate!" if they don't abuse it.

The cop in question is Detective Wu Ming-Han (Greg Hsu Kuang-Han), who is homophobic enough after busting a gay man in a gym's locker room for it not to seem like a good look, especially to co-worker Tzu-Ching (Gingle Wang Ching), who is exceptionally competent but mostly gets assigned to duties that highlight how good she looks in her uniform. After they run down drug dealer A-Gao (Chang Tsai-Hsing), Wu picks up a red envelope while gathering evidence, only to find it was planted by an old lady (Wang Man-Chiao) looking to arrange a "ghost marriage" for her gay grandson Mao Pang-yu (Lin Po-Hung). Not going through with it would be extremely bad luck, even beyond being reassigned to a tiny police station, but when Wu discovers he can see and hear "Mao-Mao", they decide that the best way to get him to reincarnate is seeing to his unfinished business, either with boyfriend Chen Chia-Hao (Aaron Yan) or tracking down the car that hit him, which turns out to be tied to the crime boss Tzu-Ching and the rest of Wu's former colleagues are investigating, Lin Hsiao-Yuan (Tsai Chen-Nan).

Writer/director Cheng Wei-Hao is likely best known for directing the first two movies in Taiwan's The Tag-Along horror series, but is obviously going for a much lighter sort of ghost story here, hitting quite a few familiar beats: Wu talks a lot to someone everyone else can't see, while Mao tries to help by giving him information he couldn't actually know, at least once he's through making Wu squirm for being a prejudiced jerk that he doesn't really want to be attached to. Some of the jokes about gay guys and straight guys have whiskers on them - Wu comes off as the sort of man who likes to dress to impress right up until it's time for Mao to sadly shake his head, for instance - but there's also some kind of interesting material about how Taiwan actually making same-sex marriage legal kind of messed with a culture built on the assumption of being an outsider.

Making a movie is in large part execution as much as creativity, though, and a lot of this one is just plain done well. Take that car chase in the first act, for instance; it has a really good rhythm even if it also feels like a lot was built inside a computer; it went from storyboard to shooting to effects very well indeed. Cheng and his co-writers have a good handle on how to manage a zany but friendly tone without making the audience balk at taking shortcuts, both in how it quickly establishes that most everyone here from cops to grannies treats homophobia as, at best, embarrassingly old-fashioned and in how it uses the same sort of supernatural belief in fate that weds Wu and Mao to tie the pieces of its story together without relying on lucky coincidences. Bits like how actually possessing someone isn't good for a ghost keep things from being too easy but also lead to enjoyably goofy things like the visual of Mao taking a deep drag of burning incense to recharge and reform.

Greg Tsu and Lin Po-Hung make a likable enough odd couple; their scenes together are better than just being perfunctory but they fall a bit short of actually growing into buddies rather than people who don't actually dislike each other. They're likable enough once the initial friction is past, and Hsu has Wu grow out of his bad habits nicely. As is often the case, the supporting characters often get to have more fun: Wang Man-Chiao seemingly has a ball as a matchmaking-granny stereotype who is aggressively up for applying that to Mao, while Gingle Wang is exceptionally good at having Tzu-Ching know she's much smarter than a himbo like Wu without pushing it past where it's funny.

One kind of wants more of Gingle Wang despite also being glad that this isn't a movie about a gay person helping two straights get together, and the fact that someone like Tzu-Ching simultaneously gets a lot of attention and overlooked does pay off. The resolution may ultimately be a little long on "okay, I guess that happened", but what can you do when one of the main characters was dead to start with? This sort of broad comedy didn't need more weight at the end than that anyway.

Fantasia 2022.16: What's Up Connection, Whether the Weather Is Fine, and The Witch Part 2: The Other One.

I should have made some notes on just why things dragged out my mornings, because on this day it knocked out the first movie of the day (not that I was really that excited about an underground-fight-club movie), and then the second film of the day was something I'd already seen (Shari is pretty nifty), and then as it approached 5pm, I realized that What's Up Connection, which caught my eye on the schedule, would actually stretch past the start of the next movie in Hall, which I'd figured to see because the one in de Seve had a later show. Ah, well, might as well do three movies instead of two today rather than potentially five rather than four on another, especially because the schedule might be tight.

Amusingly, I hadn't really looked up what sort of movie I was into, figuring it was crazy Hong Kong/Japan action, and then saw Camera Lucida programmer Ariel Esteban Cayer get up and I realized it was a different sort of film. It wound up pretty decent, but it was a kind of weird intro; Camera Lucida can seem like one has wandered into a different festival from Fantasia's genre stuff, and the intro was talking about this whole movement and set of less-known filmmakers like we'd all been attending a series on this at the Harvard Film Archive or the like. Not bad, just odd, before getting to how Cayer is also one of the guys behind Kani, a new home video distributor for this sort of film (I've got one, Be Natural, and they did have cool stickers for this one).

The day eventually ended on The Witch: Part 2: The Other One, which is one of those cases where a film that had distribution but apparently doesn't hit Montreal during its spring run - does Well Go just not get along with the guys who book the Cineplex in the old Forum very well? Usually, it gives me a little flexibility; this time, since it didn't play Boston, it got locked in early. Surprisingly, it never occurred to me that it didn't play Boston not just because it's a sequel to something that had limited availability (this seldom stops Chinese movies, for instance, or Korean ones with Ma Dong-seok), but because it's maybe not exactly great.

No guests, again. After this, we head into the last weekend of the fest, with Island of Lost Girls, The Pass: Last Days of the Samurai, Circo Animato, Sadako DX, and Missing.

Tenamonya Connection (What's Up Connection)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, DCP)

What's Up Connection is a genuinely mad little film that threw me for a couple reasons, the most important probably being that "character is most important!" is so often treated as holy writ in terms of making and discussing movies, and filmmaker Masashi Yamamoto seems barely interested in such things. Apparently he was more interested in the evils of capitalism, although maybe not as much as he was interested in just seeing what he could do in making a movie split between Japan and Hong Kong on a shoestring and embracing the chaos that ensues

It starts out following the Chi family, particularly Gau-Shul (Tse Wai-Kit), who is in his late teens or early twenties and has a house because in this part of Hong Kong, if you build a house, you claim the land, so his family has grabbed a strip. Each has, somehow, won a free vacation, and Gau-shul is looking forward to his trip to Japan with girlfriend Yu-Chan, only to have her dump him before he leaves. The company handling the tour on the other end is awful fly-by-night, with guide Yumi not speaking great Cantonese or English and just starting that day to boot. Soon enough, Gau-Shul gets his pocket picked, but even when they track down thief Akane, she's spent all his money. He does get back to Hong Kong, where he discovers that a multinational corporation has been buying up large chunks of the neighborhood with the intent to build a new World Trade Center, with Gau-Shul's mother in particular rallying to stop him.

For some reason, Yumi and Akane are along for the ride, perhaps because Yamamoto was making the film for a Japanese audience and didn't want to jettison his Japanese characters, and while it seems like the heart of the film could be why Yumi sticks around Chi Gau-Shul and helps out his family even though he's still sort of pining for Yu-Chan. She's probably got the best actor in the film playing her and she's just kind of hanging around most of the time because this isn't really a film where relationships matter in the way you'd expect for independent films of this scale.

(Note: As near as I can tell, few members of the cast other than Tse Wai-Kit have been credited in other features, and this Reiko Arai is probably not the same actress who was active from 1950 to 1974; hopefully the upcoming Blu-ray release will make this clearer!)

Instead, the director seemingly wants to say something about international capitalism and consumerism, but hasn't really thought much about any sort of thesis beyond generally being against it. If there's a specific satiric target, it's a bit unclear thirty years later, and there's something a bit unbalanced in how the big businesses are mostly sort of realistically bland while the Chis and their alloys are colorful and eventually resisting in ways that are larger than life. Those bits of the movie aren't on the same page, and while Yamamoto is trying a lot of different things in different areas, it leaves a lot of times when it's fair to ask where he's going with this.

And yet, I still found myself kind of delighted by the end, just by the sheer "sure, why the hell not?" improvisational feel of the movie. It's probably not completely made up on the spot, or even mostly so, but it sure as heck seems insanely random, from the point where it seemed completely impossible to shoot a street scene without everybody deciding to talk to the camera, leading to the film becoming a documentary about people living on the street in Osaka to just randomly switching in different actors (apparently the actress playing Akane wasn't available for part of the Hong Kong shoot) to the utter madness of the last act. Few films are actually made up as the creators go along, but I suspect that a lot of independent films find themselves boxed into corners logistically and opt to shoot and edit around what they can't do rather than plow through.

And, it's worth mentioning, the film is frequently very funny. There's a bit about how getting some pay-per-view porn in one of those infamous Japanese capsule hotels is probably not a great idea and some entertainingly goofy physical comedy. Yamamoto also seldom ends up getting stuck when he suddenly dials things up to eleven, quietly getting back where he can spring something else on the audience without appearing to reverse course.

I don't want to say this is less a story than a vibe because the vibe is all over the place, but it is impressive anarchy, the sort that another underground Japanese auteur, Seijun Suzuki, was known for. Film is generally too collaborative with resources too tight to feel this random without also being an obvious disaster, and that's something worth checking out.

Kun maupay man it panahon (Whether the Weather Is Fine)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There's something potentially powerful about walking through a devastated landscape, pondering what the loss of all this means or potentially just trying to survive, but it kind of helps if the character at the center grabs one's interest early. It does, eventually, have something to say about what all this means for Miguel, but it takes a while to get there, maybe asking the audience to look for what happens rather than what does.

As it opens, 2013's Typhoon Haiyan has nearly leveled Talcoban City on the island of Leyte in the Philippines, and as the camera descends on Miguel (Daniel Padilla), sprawled out on a couch in a building whose roof has been blown off as if he'd slept through it. His girlfriend Andrea (Francinne Rifol) soon finds him, and with the word being that another storm is coming, they start out looking for his mother Norma (Charo Santos-Concio) and evacuation to Manila. Angela is by far the most intense of the group, drawing a gun and making a man slaughter stray chickens for them, while Norma insists on detouring to find out what happened to her ex-husband, who left her and Miguel for another woman years ago.

Like the horror movie where nobody seemed to sweat in 100° weather a couple weeks earlier, I found myself transfixed by how the protagonists never seemed to get particularly dirty walking through a coastal city destroyed by a hurricane for a few days. Extras did, but is this a situation where continuity would just have been too time-consuming? Not that continuity is exactly a major issue for "magic realist" tagged films, but it's an odd thing to note in the middle of a film where everyone around this trio are disheveled and look like they've been through something. It sort of brings into sharp relief how this sort of movie makes a natural tragedy into background for these characters' personal issues.

It would be one thing if there were something to hold on to here, but the three main folks all seemed to be going in different directions, and Miguel at the center is so frustratingly passive that Andrea has to hang it on him, and it's easy to feel like it's to no apparent end, that there's a big space in this movie where some sort of core should be. It's not entirely untrue - I spent a lot of time wondering why I should be interested in this configuration of characters. It took a bit of time for the theme of abandonment to truly sink in - it starts from having the very roof over Miguel's head torn away, and there's the sense that he needs Andrea to take him in hand because he's quite possibly not as important to his mother as her ex-husband, while anybody who can leave Talcoban is expected to. A disaster lays bare that some seemingly nice people will easily slip into robbing others at gunpoint, some will go to ground, and others will just flee. Miguel was probably aimless before Haiyan, but its aftermath leaves an even more open question of just what his center is.

This sort of interior question doesn't particularly manifest outwardly, unfortunately; Daniel Padilla and Francinne Rifol give the impression of the pair balancing each other out, and Charo Santos-Concio presents the older woman carrying sorrow well enough, but they never quite make one want to know more. It's still often a striking movie, though: That early drone shot where the audience first sees Miguel digs its way into one's head well, and the sequences after that, showing this part of Talcoban as one of those neighborhoods where buildings bleed into each other in in every direction, emphasizes what a free-for-all the aftermath is. There's a feeling of disconnection that never quite trips into "ethereal", even in moments that bleed into the fantastic.

Writing this review after-the-fact, I'd be interested in giving Whether another look if it came my way again; there's more there than made a conscious impression on me at the time. Still, I suspect it will play much better for Filippinos and other Pacific Islanders, for whom Haiyan's devastation is something that was experienced first-hand rather than just the idea of a disaster that upends one's life.

Manyeo 2: Lo go (The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

When Park Hoon-jung's The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion played Fantasia four years ago, it was electrifying, throwing a lot of genre tropes together so they became more fresh than expected, before giving it an extra jolt of South Korean intensity and willingness to push genre boundaries. The crowd was excited to see what came next, and but its sequel is less Part 2 than The Other One - it rearranges what The Subversion did, and Park can still bring the big action, but it winds up weighted down by its familiar pieces rather than free to create something new.

If it has been a while since you've seen the first movie, you'll be forgiven for thinking that this one perhaps picks up right where it left off (give or take a flashback prologue), in the rubble of the secret lab Koo Ja-Yoon obliterated in the finale. But, no, this is a different lab, although the group laying waste to it didn't check to see that one girl (Shin Shi-A, aka "Cynthia") was dead. She makes her way to a road, where some gangsters who have kidnapped Kyung-Hee (Park Eun-Bin) grab her as a potential witness, though she makes quick work of them even if she takes a bullet or two. Kyung-Hee brings her to a vet she knows who has also done this sort of thing, both surprised how quickly the mute girl heals, and then back to the farm she and brother Dae-Gil (Sung Yoo-Bin) inherited from their late father. This puts a big old target on their backs, as not only is gangster Yong-Du (Jin Goo) looking to take possession of this farm to build a resort, but at least three factions with enhanced operatives of their own seem to feel this one is too dangerous to let live. And that's without considering that no nobody has heard from Ja-Yoon in months.

It's the "three factions" thing that really bogs the movie down; I don't recall The Subversion as being quite that complicated, and even if it was, writer/director Park could really do with getting where everyone is coming from straight: Bilingual soldiers of fortune Jo-Hyun (Seo Eun-Su) and Tom (Justin John Harvey) appear to be working for some international quasi-governmental unit, snotty-guy-in-a-tailored-black-suit Jang (Lee Jong-Suk) has some connection with Dr. Baek (Jo Min-Soo) from the original project, and the leather-clad "Tow" group seem like psychotic escaped lab rats, but since this is an entirely new cast outside of a couple extended cameos, establishing some motivations is especially important if anyone is going to switch sides or maybe become uneasy allies. Park builds the film as if it's the amoral secret societies of the first that struck a chord with people, rather than a girl that the audience still liked even if she had been presenting a facade tearing through those groups to protect and/or avenge the people who had shown her kindness.

This film tries to recapture some of that, and while it sometimes feels clumsy - Dae-Gil literally looks up Ja-Yoon on YouTube to suggest they could maybe exploit his new friend's abilities similarly - the smaller-stakes material gives the audience something to hook into, whether it being Park Eun-Bin's Kyung-Hee in her gratitude working very hard to shrug off how unusual "ADP" is, the siblings' friction, or the simple fun of a girl who has probably been fed protein bars her entire life discovering actual food on the one hand and gangsters watching a petite teenager throw something she shouldn't be able to budge at them and figuring they didn't sign up for this science-fiction stuff and maybe should regroup several miles away on the other. It's tough to get a read on Shin Shi-A in her first role - she handles the detached genetically-engineered super-assassin and the excited kid well enough individually but doesn't quite link them - although she and Park Eun-Bin tend to play well off each other.

Still, the action tends to be what raises eyebrows in this series, and director Park stages some quality mayhem here. It's easy for superhero fights to seem weightless, especially when one is using this sort of slick black color scheme to make sure it's clear this is Very Serious, but the filmmakers from director to cast to stuntpeople to fight choreographers strike a good balance between the action being larger and faster than life bust still easy to follow. Folks hit inhumanly hard, bounce back up, and heal quickly, but there is still a feeling of danger even beyond the regular people caught in the middle, and the guidelines for what people can dish out and take feels consistent. A lot of the action takes place at night, but it seldom feels like Park is trying to hide his visual effects in the dark so much as controlling his light and shadow to give the film a certain look and feel. The finale's got some striking imagery, some hell-yeah moments, and enough of a mean streak where characters who won't necessarily be needed for a hypothetical Part 3 are concerned to keep the audience on its toes.

Will the audience still want a Part 3 after this? Probably, although maybe not quite so much as they wanted a Part 2 after the last one. The series is still quite capable of bringing the cool detachment and furious violence, but it's at a point where it needs to be about something rather than just the surface. This movie too often felt like the same good pieces in a new order, and the next should hopefully recapture the excitement of doing something that feels new in a familiar genre again.

Fantasia 2019 Catch-up, Part 4: Dance with Me, Ode to Nothing, Fly Me to the Saitama, L'Intervention, A Good Woman Is Hard to Find, Black Magic for White Boys, The Father's Shadow, and Door Lock

Yeah, I'm looking at the dates I saw these movies and the dates I've posted full reviews on eFilmCritic and just kind of sighing. Insert the usual comments about how I need to commit to cranking through things faster, not working my day job during the festival, cutting down my caffeine intake to a point where I'm focused and alert but not jittery.

(Or we could talk about how I apparently take great notes and do good first drafts in the middle of a five-movie-a-day festival!)

I am kind of shocked that of the eight movies in this update, only one has actually become available to watch in the United States over the intervening nine months, at least from my searching on Prime Video and JustWatch (which seems like it could include some more services but I probably the best index of availability we have). It doesn't seem like too long ago that turnaround on what I saw at Fantasia was incredibly fast, and not just because some selections were effectively word-of-mouth screenings before the imminent DVD release! There were a lot more labels that could get material onto store shelves if not theaters, and I wonder to what extent VOD and streaming has changed the game in unexpected ways. When IFC Midnight buys the US distribution rights to something from Spain or Brazil, and instead of manufacturing a disc they can sell for $20 starts looking at rentals… Well, when I pay $7 to rent something on Amazon, what's left between what Amazon takes and what they send back to Canal+ or whoever? It feels like the margins on importing films are really thin these days, unless you're Amazon or Netflix, and then I wouldn't be shocked if foreign studios are uncomfortable locking themselves into that sort of exclusivity with no per-purchase money. And since the theaters with those big comfy chairs and almost an hour between screenings to include 20 minutes of trailers, 20 minute advertising package, and 10 minutes for cleaning just have fewer seat-times for everything, crowding smaller stuff out, and now things don't have the legitimacy of a theatrical release. The exception is Chinese and Indian films, but they're day-and-date so the festival circuit doesn't mean much.

What genre labels we do have these days seem more focused on getting older material out, which is great - Arrow, Shout!, Kino, Vinegar Syndrome, and the like are doing fantastic, necessary work. It just feels genuinely odd to me that some of the movies I saw last July which seem pretty appealing to people unafraid of subtitles (and were released in their home countries earlier), like Dance with Me and Door Lock, are probably going to hang around in limbo for a little longer and then maybe appear after you've scrolled down a search for a while with little fanfare because what festival hype they got is two years disconnected from a scattered release. Even now, when we've got all the time in the world to catch up on stuff, it's hard to know what to catch up on.

(sighs)

Anyway, you can (as of this writing) watch L'Intervention (though you may need to search for "15 Minutes of War"), and A Good Woman Is Hard to Find was scheduled for a May theatrical release, and who knows, maybe the distributor will make it available for indie theaters' virtual screening rooms. And it's looking even more vital to get to film festivals more when we've got film festivals again, because that seems to be the only way some of these movies will have a chance to snap their fingers in front of our faces and tell us they exist.

Dance With Me

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Movie and stage musicals are grandly and gloriously unreal in a way that little else in popular culture manages to be, and people can't handle it; almost every one made these days builds in some excuse for the songs rather than giving the audience credit for understanding that they are not what's literally happening. Dance With Me is no exception, but it does that well enough to make one want to see what filmmaker Shinobu Yaguchi and star Ayaka Miyohsi could do without making excuses, since they've clearly got the right screwball instincts and the film is ultimately about loving this sort of material whether it's realistic or not.

Miyoshi plays Shizuka Suzuki, a sensible office worker who does her sister a favor by looking after niece Nana while she's in the city for a day, agreeing just a little too hard when Nana disparages having to do a song for the school talent show. They stumble upon once-famous hypnotist Martin Ueda (Akira Takarada) at an amusement park, and the hokum he does to get Nana over her stage fright instead lodges in Shizuka's head, so that the next day, any music she hears, from her workout mix to a co-worker's ringtone, has her singing and dancing along like a character in a musical. Ueda has already skipped town, but the out-of-work actress who had been working as his assistant (Yuu Yashiro), decides to help her track him down - not only was she a part of this, but Ueda didn't pay her. Or the yakuza. Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiking street musician (Chay) and hire a cheap private detective, but the odds that they find Ueda before Shizuka has to be back to work on Monday are looking slim.

The thing that mostly makes Dance With Me work is the thing that basically gives the game away; there are large chunks that the audience will not believe unless, at some point, the movie's heroine learned how to do all the singing and dancing, even if the trail of destruction she leaves as the result of her compulsion to make any song she hears into a musical number suggests that maybe she didn't, and once you've put that in her backstory, there's little doubt what she has to confront. Like a lot of meta-musicals, it's often conveying how characters bursting into song is great for conveying big emotions rather than just doing that, but Shizuka's story is eventually her own. How this will end is never in doubt, and is just a matter of making the path leading there crooked.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Oda sa wala (Ode to Nothing)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Films like Ode to Nothing aren't quite a genre unto themselves, but after a while one can be a bit jaded: It's sad, with a fanciful but eccentrically morbid premise, the sort of thing that's a bit transgressive and daring, but which is clearly meant to be taken seriously. They get made on a regular basis because there's something to it, and when someone has as keen an eye for where she's going with the idea as Dwein Baltazar does with this one.

She begins by introducing the audience to Sonya (Marietta "Pokwang" Subong), who runs a small funeral home, presumably passed down from her father Rudy (Joonee Gamboa), who mostly sits in the apartment above in silence, waiting for Sonya to prepare dinner, while she deals with people who want to haggle past the last minute. They're behind in rent and loan-shark landlord Theodor (Dido de la Paz) when a Jane Doe is dropped on their doorstep, and as time drags on, she starts to find the corpse more friendly company that her father, though she has her eye on handsome street vendor Elmer (Anthony Falcon).

It's kind of hard to grasp the level of loneliness on display in Ode to Nothing at first. It's right out front from the start, and it is fairly clear that this is what the film will be about from the start, but Sonya must sink deep into a genuinely frightening desperation before the full extent of how it's eating at her becomes completely clear, and that's when the filmmakers know that they can push the film somewhere else. They often choose not to, sinking further into despair, but the possibility was there. The audience still knows that a line has been crossed, that the characters have reached the next crossroads, but the fact that things clearly could change at these points but don't every time just emphasizes how difficult it can be to get out of such a hole.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Tonde Saitama (Fly Me to the Saitama)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

This may not be the most shojo movie possible, assuming I'm not being my manga categories mixed up, but even if I am, it's right up there in terms of just being absurdly, specifically Japanese, and regionally so at that. It shouldn't travel at all, even to a festival audience of people who love Japanese pop culture, and yet it got the biggest laughs of any film there, because for all that the jokes are specific, the spirit is not, and the way they're told is something anyone can laugh at.

The Saitama is a Tokyo suburb, described as the bits that were left over when Tokyo and Yokohama separated, and apparently not well-regarded by its neighbors. Teenage Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) is embarrassed to be from there, something of great consternation to father Yoshiumi (Brother Tom) and mother Maki (Kumiko Aso) as they take a road trip. Frustrated, Yoshiumi turns on a radio drama, set in a heightened Tokyo where Class President Momomi Hakuhodo (Fumi Nikaido), a stiletto-heeled monster from the very best family, rules her high school with an iron fist with the Saitamese basically servants living in hovels, though she is as immediately smitten with new transfer student Rei Asami (Gackt) as anyone - "you can still smell the America on him!" What she doesn't know is that before he went abroad, he lived in the Saitama, and has been sent to infiltrate high society and destroy it from within.

Though I can't recall ever seeing any of the manga Mineo Maya specifically, original series Tonde Saitama was published in a girls' manga magazine and director Hideki Takeuchi is clearly channeling the general style, with its elaborate hair and fashion, lean and androgynously handsome men, and generally exaggerated visuals represented and amplified on-screen. It's a somewhat garish style that often works better on the page than screen, but this is a story that lets the filmmakers lean into it; between the contrast with the modern simplicity of the car and the satirical intent, it's no leap for the style to be self-parodying. After a while, becoming more ridiculous is a big part of how Takeuchi and screenwriter Yuichi Tokunaga keep it light rather than mean.

Full review on EFilmCritic

L'Intervention (15 Minutes of War)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

From the subtitles, the English title for this film is "15 Minutes of War", which naturally leads to the question of what's going to happen for the other 80. The answer is a lot of simple competence, making for a very French take on the sort of military action film that, in American hands, often seems to be more likely to overflow with testosterone even when trying to be modest and self-deprecating. The differences are sometimes subtle and the end result is about the same, but it's still a good result.

It takes place in 1976; at the time, Djibouti was France's last colony, not necessarily a status that the people there and in neighboring nations were too fond of. In February, three terrorists - Barkhard (Kevin Layne), Morad (Andre Pierre), and Ilyans (Adbeladim Mazouzi) - hijack a bus containing 31 students and teacher Jane Andersen (Olga Kurylenko) and drive it to the Somali border. They wind up in a no-man's-land between the two, and while France dispatches a team of elite soldiers led by André Gerval (Alban Lenoir), the terrain is built for a stalemate and a move in the wrong direction could cause an even bigger international incident.

If you know the genre, you know the drill, but it's pretty pleasant, at least as military action movies go. This film is procedural, spending a fair amount of time on working out tactics, with the GIGN unit arguing with other groups on the scene and command back home in Paris, just in a somewhat less shouty manner. Meanwhile, having a teacher in the middle of the hostage situation gives the filmmakers plenty of chances to check in and make sure that the audience knows what the stakes are, and Olga Kurylenko slides into that role nicely, catching the way a character taking a job in this place necessarily has an adventurous side without being fearless and playing off everybody from the child actors to Kevin Layne's domineering mission leader well. Alban Lenoir, Michaël Abiteboul, Ben Cura, and that crew know the level of mission-focused confidence that stops short of cruelty that one wants the soldiers to show.

Full review on EFilmCritic

A Good Woman Is Hard to Find

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

A Good Woman Is Hard to Find starts as one sort of crime movie and evolves into another, and truth be told, it's the first half that seems to have the greater potential at first. Of course, a lot of the best genre movies are built around hidden potential both in the characters and story, and that's what makes this one sing - the right casting and some willingness to crank up the pressure can do wonders for even the most threadbare thriller plots, and this one's got some really good work from top to bottom.

The potential good woman in question is Sarah Collins (Sarah Bolger), recently widowed without much of a safety net; after a flash-forward, she's introduced carefully doing math in a Belfast supermarket as she shops for herself and her two children. Ben (Rudy Doherty) is six years old and hasn't spoken since his father was killed, and Lucy (Macie McCauley) is four. As if they haven't had enough trauma, their car is stolen and the guy who did so, Tito (Andrew Simpson), eventually decides to lay low at Sarah's house, since the very randomness of choosing their car means local crime boss Leo Miller (Edward Hogg) won't be know where to find the guy who stole his drugs. It is, naturally, a terrible plan for all involved.

The nifty casting turns out to be Sarah Bolger, who invests this young working-class widow with plenty of nerve when appropriate, a hard-earned variety that's convincing enough that the film has no need to open with or flash back to the events that put the family in its current position - the audience can see exactly how much she loved her late husband even if he wasn't perfect in the way she tenses up in every scene with her mother and in how she seems defiant in her survival. The script seldom makes her overconfident or timid, and she's got the right mix of courage and fear at all times, someone who knows her capability but recognizes real danger. Bolger always seems to recognize that she's in a crime movie even when being placed in relatively ordinary situations, always looking over her shoulder or otherwise paying extra attention.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Black Magic for White Boys

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

I'm not particularly curious to see the previous iteration(s) of Black Magic for White Boys, which got a fairly thorough retooling between its initial screening at Tribeca and when it played Fantasia two years later, including a time when it was retooled as a mini-series. I'm not sure whether or not to be surprised that this work still left it with obvious gaps and issues; it's a messy process but one that could have filled in all the gaps. It's still frequently funny in a charmingly homemade way; its seemingly effect-less effects and unrefined characters have the nice effect of Onur Tukel's film just laying what it wants out there.

It revolves around a small theater in Brooklyn, where "Larry the Magnificent" (Ronald Guttman) puts on an unimpressive magic show with the aid of assistants Lucy (Eva Dorrepaal) and Dean (Colin Buckingham), with a new intern in Alina (Deni Juhos) just brought in. Landlord Jamie (Jamie Block) is about to put them out of business with a 30% rent increase, but Larry has an ace in the hole - a line on real magic, the ability to make things disappear, although things apparently went wrong when he used it last - though, apparently, in a different way than his "freelance work" for Jamie. Meanwhile, Jamie's friend Oscar (Onur Tukel), who has been cheerfully living off a trust fund, is freaking out that girlfriend Chase (Charlie LaRose) is pregnant, while "pharmacist" Fred (Franck Raharinosy) is dispensing pills with nigh-magical effects to many members of the group.

This is the sort of quirky New York-based indie that can seem insular whether one is inside its particular bubble or not, since even such cockeyed enough versions of the fringe theater and arriviste worlds can still seem like a movie-length private joke, and writer/director/co-star Onur Tukel has been relatively prolific even if his films have been relatively small blips outside the festival circuit. Making that sort of movie puts a filmmaker in touch with a potentially pretty decent cast, even if Ronald Guttman is probably the only one whom most viewers will immediately think they've seen somewhere before. They are, by and large, playing people who are not quite so odd as to be interesting if one met them randomly but who can can drop a line that's selfish or oblivious or some combination of both so that it lands the right way as to give one a sense of who they are and have it not be completely awful, even when they have more or less accepted that they are kind of awful.

Full review on EFilmCritic

A Sombra do Pai (The Father's Shadow)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The Father's Shadow is the second film from Gabriela Amaral as writer/director and it's more or less what one would hope for in a second feature: It's got the style and intensity that makes it a piece with Friendly Beast but a story that is not any sort of repetition and the confidence to try something more emotionally ambitious. That "has she made anything else/oh I liked that/and this is even better" hit is one of the best parts of going to festivals or immersing oneself in less-heralded films long-term.

It's the story of Dalva (Nina Medeiros), a quiet ten-year-old girl in a small town whose mother has recently passed away and whose father Jorge (Julio Machado) is crumbling. Aunt Cristina (Luciana Paes) has been attempting to fill the gap, but her fiancé Elton (Rafael Raposo) is moving to the city and wants her to come along. Before leaving, she teaches Dalva some traditional magic, but it's not always of practical use as she tries to raise herself and look after her father.

It's immediately obvious that this film is going to live and die by how well the audience can connect with Dalva. That's no slight on the work Julio Macado and Luciana Paes do as the rest of her family - they impress - but it's clear right away that their jobs are to establish the child's environment as much as tell their own story. Happily, the young actress in this movie, Nina Medeiros, is genuinely amazing, and even if it's just a matter of casting the girl who could best give the movie what it needs most of the time - a skinny body seemingly about to collapse under the weight on the family stress put upon her hiding eyes that indicate almost frightening intensity - getting the right amount and focus in any given scene is no small thing. She's great and delivers exactly what the movie needs at every moment even when silent. It's a tense little performance that convinces the audience that anything is possible for Dalva, from collapse to genuine sorcery.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Door Lock

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

It seems as though nifty movie ideas get passed around the world and redone for local audiences more than they used to, well beyond how folks used to complain that it was mainly Americans who didn't want to deal with subtitles. I think that I have seen the movie which inspired this film (Sleep Tight), but it's not like the case of another Korean remake of a Spanish thriller a couple years ago when I realized that I knew what's going to happen next about ten minutes in. It certainly feels like its own movie, and a thriller that doesn't mess around much to boot.

Door Lock opens with a bit of CCTV footage from outside an apartment very much like the one occupied by Jo Gyeung-min (Kong Hyo-Jin), a loan officer who is very on-edge about her personal safety - aside from seeming dizzy and dull in the morning, she notes her electronic lock behaving erratically, and eyes fellow passengers on the subway and a package delivered to bank where she works with suspicion. She's got reason to be worried, but only co-worker Oh Hyo-Ju (Kim Ye-Won) believes her without reservation, and in this sort of situation, it's not necessarily any easier to trust Detective Lee (Kim Sung-Oh) or okay-seeming supervisor Kim Sung-Ho (Lee Chun-Hee) than combative customer Kim Ki-Jung (Jo Bok-Rae) or custodian Han Dong-Hoon (Lee Ga-Sub).

Full review on EFilmCritic

Fantasia 2019 Catch-up, Part 2: The Deeper You Dig, Away, Jade's Asylum, Almost a Miracle, The Wonderland, Hit-and-Run Squad, Dreamland, Chiwawa, Porno, and Mystery of the Night

On the one hand, I'm sad that Away didn't wind up getting a theatrical release, because I really loved it and the audience was into it.

On the other, you can purchase it on Amazon Prime Video for six bucks in HD. You can also rent it for two or three, but, come on, that's an absurdly good price even to just hold

Anyway, enjoy me trying to make a case for/against movies based upon my Letterboxd entries and notes several months later!

The Deeper You Dig

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

Every time I see a movie like The Deeper You Dig, I wonder how many more groups there are out there like the family that made it, tight-knit enough to do something as resource-and-time-consuming as a movie not just for no money but without the expectation that it will lead to something else. Hundreds, probably, with vanishingly few cracking the lineups of a major genre festival, mostly winding up on virtual shelves next to a hundred times as many self-published novels and indie rock MP3s online. Like most of that material, it will almost certainly not be the most accomplished or easily-recommended movies you'll see all year, but it's individual enough that it will speak almost directly to those who like it.

Ivy Allen (Toby Poser) has a good little grift going as a fortune teller, with 14-year-old daughter Echo (Zelda Adams) helping, shall we say, to set the scene. With other things to do around the house, Ivy's not able to watch Echo as she goes sledding on one of those winter days where the sun goes down quickly, and she is hit by a drunk driver. Horrified, Kurt (John Adams) starts to turn his life around, even making firends with Ivy when they meet in town and guiltily helping out where he can. Of course, it turns out that Ivy's connection to the spirit realm isn't completely imaginary, and Echo is not resting easily.

It's a bit strange to call a horror movie "cute", but that's the sort of vibe this DIY production gives off, especially once you know that the main cast are real-life parents and daughter. It's less actually scary than an earnest attempt to make a scary movie, with the basic shape of a ghost story and the bones of a good parallel between the haunted parties, though it can't help but feel more like people excited to make a horror movie than a group into the particular story they're telling. On top of that, it's a bit of a case where ghosts aren't necessarily as interesting as the guilt that they represent. That said, when the film takes an odd twist that leads to the movie trying to do two or three different things at once that don't quite mesh, it at least handles it better than a lot of films that take a big swing do. The last act may not be quite so eerie or unnerving as it is meant to, but it is also not nearly so unintentionally funny as expected.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Away

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)

It's a rare feature film that is as singularly the work of one artist as Away, and of that small sample, few are this good. With nobody else credited on the film, director Gints Zilbalodis strips an adventure story down to fundamentals, makes some choices that maybe a larger team might not have, and comes through with an animated film for all ages that comes across as unique but not gimmicky.

The plot is dead-simple - a boy has survived a plane crash, starting the movie dangling from a tree by his parachute. He's in the middle of the wilderness, and the nearest city, Cloud Harbor, is some distance away. He's soon befriended by a yellow bird who seems to be about as alone as he is, and together, they journey through dangerous and surreal landscapes in hope of getting to the place that can get him home.

Away is a very simple movie in a lot of ways - Gints Zilbalodis made it on his own, and he's smart to keep from overburdening himself in ways that filmmakers telling this sort of story often do. He doesn't bother with dialogue, for instance, and makes it feel natural by not feeling the need to give the boy someone to talk to. He has, in large part, structured the film like a video game, and rendered it either with a gaming engine or some similar software, and it becomes an intriguing artistic choice on top of being very practical: It works as this boy attacking his problems in a way he understands, and why he doesn't necessarily need to be vocal. Zilbalodis doesn't make it an overt theme by being judgmental - this isn't a "kid who only knows the world through screens can't handle the real thing" movie - but going for a gaming aesthetic lets him buck filmmaking conventions and create different ways of understanding a character who doesn't have much reason to explain himself.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Jade's Asylum

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, ProRes)

I can't say I much enjoyed Jade's Asylum, but the discussion with the filmmakers included one of the more tellingly confessional moments I've seen at a festival screening: It went from mostly indoors to mostly outdoors when they got on site and saw that their monster suit didn't look good in the mansion they'd rented. It doesn't make the final product better, but it gives one an idea of how many different pieces have to come together for a movie to work and an appreciation for how often you have to try and fix things on the fly.

The mansion is somewhere in Costa Rica, to which Jade Williams (Morgan Kohan) has come with boyfriend Toby Hunter (Kjartan Hewitt), one of several guests Toby's brother Wesley (Jeff Teravaninen) has invited for a housewarming party. Most are obnoxious bro types, although Mike (Sebastian Pigott) seems pretty decent despite coming with Instagram-diva girlfriend Tanya (Deanna Jarvis). Jade's in a fragile state and ready to walk back to the city to try and get home despite not having the money to fly back to Canada and Toby unwilling to help despite not really wanting her there, and that state of mind is not going to improve with a bunch of dudes covered in mushroom coming out of the woods to attack the gringos.

There's potential to that, if you want to dig into these characters' relationships and maybe make what's got Jade reeling feel much more central, but filmmaker Alexandre Carrière never seems to find anything there, and stretches what he has thin. This movie is 83 minutes long, but includes a whole ton of outtakes and such over the end credits, along with other big chunks of runtime wasted on pointless nonlinear circling back around to various flashbacks and flash-forwards throughout the film. Take out the subplots that go nowhere and the repetition and there's maybe a half-hour of movie here, and that half-hour doesn't make a lot of sense. One suspects that it is missing a lot of pieces that could have clarified things, but Carrière instead pursues the sort of ambiguity that does a movie little good unless there's something more compelling behind "real or not?" Maybe retooling while they shot put the filmmakers in a bad position, but the result isn't good.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Machida kun no sekai (Almost a Miracle aka Machida's World)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSeve (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

It's always the ducks. No matter what the cartoon, or movie, or what, the ducks will be the funniest part. They don't actually make themselves known until relatively late, but the teenagers in this movie give them a run for their money, making for a high-school comedy that, for all of its eccentricities, often gets at the heart of what it means to be growing up and finding oneself.

Most notable is Hajime Machida (Kanata Hosoda), who is helpful and altruistic to the point where folks really don't know what to make of him. He winds up at the infirmary at the same time as Nana Inohara (Nagisa Sekimizu), and while something seems to spark, Machida immediately makes it weird. Meanwhile, Ryota NIshino (Taiga Nakano) likes Inohara but accidentally sends his letter declaring it to Machida, recently-dumped Sakura Takashima (Mitsuki Takahata) likes Machida but is liked by Yu Himuro (Takanori Iwata), and a struggling writer (Koichi Sato) thinks that there's a story in all this.

The teens are a bunch of lovable weirdos trying to figure themselves out, sometimes from odd starting points, and the compulsively altruistic Machida is intriguing for how he's such an extreme character who is such an odd type that one might find him hard to believe in, at least compared to some of the others - the cynical, gossiped-about Inohara is certainly much more immediately recognizable. It's often hard to be sure just what to make of Machida's broad-ranging generosity, especially since Kanata Hosoda's performance often makes it clear that Machida is doing what he has been told he should do, but there's not a contrasting "real Machida" behind it. It's a bit of a put-on, but also genuine. It's often easier to recognize the suspicion and confusion in Inohara's reactions; Nagisa Sekimizu plays a more conventional complex teen.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Bâsudê wandârando (The Wonderland)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, digital)

The Wonderland (aka "Birthday Wonderland") has all the surface elements of big, respectable anime - a decent coming-of-age story, absolutely beautiful animation, certain specific character types, a traditional life/environmental message - and does each of them well enough that it plays really well from minute to minute. The trouble is that the whole doesn't fit together in a way that does those pieces justice. It's kind of about moving forward but also accepting destiny and how modern life isn't good for the soul but also shopping… It's all over the place.

It has a common sort of template. Akane (voice of Mayu Matsuoka) is a moody girl turning thirteen, sent by mother Midori (voice of Kumiko Aso) on an errand to the junk shop run by Akane's weird aunt Chii (voice of Anne Watanabe), which gets stranger than things usually do around Chii: A secret passage opens and the alchemist Hippocrites (voice of Masachika Ichimura) and his apprentice Pipo (voice of Nao Toyama) emerge, seeking the "Goddess of the Green Wind" and deciding it's Akane. Soon, they're all transported back to another land, magical and of an earlier era, where Zan Gou (voice of Keiji Fujiwara) and his bat-like sidekick Doropo (voice of Akiko Yajima) are collecting metal for a nefarious purpose, and if Akane doesn't stop them with her "Momentum Anchor" necklace, she'll never get home.

I can't speak for Sachiko Kashiwaba's original novel, but the movie is scattered as heck. That doesn't make it bad, although it can start to wear; it's got the sort of quest structure that has a viewer just starting to get a feel for something before it's on to the next thing, leaving characters and settings and the like behind. For all that growing up is in many ways the process of taking all of this and figuring it out to make it part of oneself, there's not much time spent on Akane resolving these complexities or coming up with her own perspective. The film is never quite just things happening to Akane, but she finds herself along for the ride more often than leading the charge.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Bbaengban (Hit-and-Run Squad)

* * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

How does a movie about Seoul's car-crash investigators, on the tail of a Formula 1-driving criminal mastermind, have so little in the way of automotive action? For crying out loud, when a person buys a ticket for a movie named "Hit-and-Run Squad", they've got expectations, so get to the car chases already! This thing is 133 minutes long and really only has a couple of worthy bits of stunt driving.

That mastermind is "JC" Jung Jae-Chul (Cho Jung-Seok), who retired from the track early to get into business and has seemingly gotten as far as he has with bribery and extortion. It's being investigated by prosecutor Yoo Ji-Hyun (Yum Jung-Ah) and Lieutenant Eun Shi-Yeon (Kong Hyo-Jin), but when a sting backfires in disastrous fashion, with a star witness (Park Hyoung-Soo) attempting suicide during an interrogation and Eun reassigned to investigating car accidents. Not exactly a great career step for a rising star, and she's partnered with Seo Min-Jae (Ryoo Joon-Yeol), who can read an accident scene like a savant but isn't allowed to drive himself because of his checkered past. Then again, it's not like Eun is actually going to let this go, and Seo's skills may prove useful considering that JC still really likes his cars.

Even when you consider that JC is still invested in racing and racing-adjacent businesses, there's still a fairly substantial gulf in what goes on in those two types of stories, and the screenplay by Kim Kyung-Chan and director Han Jun-Hee doesn't do the best job in bridging it. The worst part is, all of the twisty corruption stuff which takes up the bulk of the running time not only doesn't make much sense, it's boring. The writers never seem to figure out who should be the big villain and why - the corruption seems to be fairly generic as opposed to in the service of something in particular - and it keeps stretching out and reversing until it becomes extremely hard to care about all the material that is just making the movie longer. There is so much going on that just doesn't matter, and it dilutes the bits that at least hint at something interesting in the focus on corruption.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Dreamland (aka Bruce McDonald's Dreamland)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

The opening stretch of Bruce McDonald's Dreamland introduces a bunch of visually striking characters against a moody environment, has then open their mouths to begin a story, and then summarily has the all shot them in the head. The rest of the film isn't quite that nihilistic, but it is fairly pointedly eccentric and detached, the sort of thing that needs the idea that anything can happen in the audience's head lest they get frustrated with how little is happening right now. McDonald is going for a specific idea of cool here above all else, where it's more important to be stylish than tense.

It is plenty stylish, mostly taking place in the neighborhoods of a European capital where the movies that make a person want to visit Europe take place, the parts not developed into glass skyscrapers or filled with historical buildings that remain preserved in amber. There's cafes and clubs and pawnshops, and the assassin who frequents them taps into a network of cigarette-smoking urchins in suits, one of several places where the wires seem to be crossed and weird chimeras created. McDonald and his collaborators do a decent job of finding entertaining ways of mixing familiar tropes up into different arrangements so that there's often something both comfortingly familiar and bizarrely creative about them when he attempts to do so usually misses the mark.

Not everybody can fit into that sort of milieu, but frequent McDonald collaborator Steven McHattie can, and this movie fits him like a glove. He has a dual role, laying both a world-weary assassin and a decadent trumpet player, and a viewer probably wouldn't want anyone else playing either of those parts, even if the way the film winks at it is another thing that makes a viewer more aware of the games being played than a part of them. Watching him shamble around as the drug-addled musician or trying to do good while not really believing in his own humanity is a distinct pleasure even when a scene is going on too long. He's surrounded by similarly entertaining support - Henry Rollins as a gangster who seems laid-back to a fault but still carries grudges, Juliette Lewis as a maniacal Countess, Lisa Houle as a sympathetic ear in a bar - but these guys are never quite completely engaged with others, just as part of their nature.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Chiwawa-chan (aka Chiwawa)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Chiwawa is structured kind of like a murder mystery, but it's 50/50 as to whether that's the direction it's going to go at any point, and that's fine. After all, it seems like the other way they could have gone with it is faux documentary, which probably would have seemed more like middle-aged folks trying to make a movie about youth, despite actually having been made by a filmmaker relatively close to his characters in age. As someone who has never been a Japanese person in their early twenties, I can 't exactly say how well the film represents that group, but it nevertheless paints an interesting portrait.

It opens with a news report on the especially grisly murder of Yoshiko Chiwako, a twenty-year-old nursing student who, it is suggested, also found herself involved in less savory situations. It is a shock to their friends - they knew Yoshiko (Shiori Yoshida) as "Chiwawa", an effervescent party girl who parachuted into their group when Yoshida (Ryo Narita) picked her up in a bar, sticking around even as relationships changed between her, best friend Yumi (Tina Tamashiro), camera-toting Nagai (Nijiro Murakami), cynical model Miki (Mugi Kadowaki), and Yoshida's friend Katsuo (Kanichiro Sato). There are some wild times and emotional blowouts, but nothing that seems to actually explain what happened to Chiwawa-chan.

Screenwriter/director Ken Ninomiya adapts a manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and though he leads off with homicide, the actual crime is not quite so important as what it implies about the life she and her friends lead, and how it lacks the stabilizing influences and structures that their parents may have had. There's rocket fuel in certain sections of this movie, like how they find a bag with six million yen (roughly $60,000 American) and blow through it in three days of partying, and it doesn't necessarily feel like something that's pushing the plot to how things are going to end. Instead, it's a sign of the abandon with which it is possible for young people to live, while the news occasionally give them reasons to live like there's no tomorrow. People stop in the last leg of the movie to be transfixed by reports of a bombing in Singapore, and like the party, it's less a story point than illustration of the times and how little is in their direct control.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Porno

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Porno is the sort of movie that feels like someone should have thought of it and done it before, but I can't think of anything particularly similar, and I bet those with better catalogs in their brains won't think of a better "monsters in a run-down movie theater" picture (although, as this is very much my thing, I'm happy to hear what obvious example I'm blanking on ). Inspiration usually seems obvious in retrospect, and thus is inspired even before the nice cast and quality, fearless execution shows up.

It takes place in the early 1990s (Encino Man and A League of Their Own are on the two-plex's marquee), and as they do every Friday night, the teenagers who work there are going to watch a movie after the customers leave. Chastity (Jillian Mueller) has just been made assistant manager, and Ricky (Glenn Stott) has just come back from camp, though his talk of the girlfriend he met there have had no noticeable effect on Chaz's crush. Also working are Abe (Evan Daves) and Todd (Larry Saperstein), but before they can tell projectionist Heavy Metal Jeff (Robbie Tann) what they want to watch, a homeless man bursts in and uncovers a secret door, behind which they find a strange archive and a third screen in the basement. Obviously, when that happens, you watch what you just found - and, of course, it's inevitable that in addition to being more sexually explicit than anything these nice church-going kids have seen before, those reels of film are exactly the sort of thing hide and seal away in horror movies because they imprison a demon.

The last quarter-century or so of cinema construction has given us recliners, digital projection and sound, stadium seating, and, more to the point, buildings where even the first wave has more or less remained in its original configuration (even if the box offices are sometimes unnervingly unmanned). I will not argue for the superiority of the places that came before, their large screens awkwardly divided, their behind-the-scenes areas cramped and labyrinthine, and their projection booths filled with equipment bolted onto projectors that have been there since the silent era, but they undeniably have history and personality, and a large portion of the audience for this movie has probably spent enough time in those places for it to resonate. The oddity of the architecture combines with the way film holds frozen life to make the movie fantastical but also kind of right.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Misterio de la noche (Mystery of the Night)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

Everybody's folklore is kind of messed up, but this movie makes it feel like a competition that the Philippines could win. It's a simple but impressively nasty combination of colonial horror and local legend, giving the audience what they've come for, albeit on a scale that may be a little too grand for what the filmmakers have to work with.

It starts with a town's mayor, Anselmo, going out to the forest to hunt, doing Father Parorozo a favor by taking a ranting, pregnant woman with his party and perhaps not being too concerned if she returns with them. A generation later, his son Domingo (Benjamin Alves) makes his own trip to the woods, where he discovers and makes love to a beautiful but feral woman who was raised by the forest spirits after her mother was killed by an angry sow. She is spellbinding but Domingo must eventually go home. "Maria" (Solenn Heussaff) follows him, but she has no more been prepared for the fact that a man who has been so attentive on his trip out of town may have a wife and child at home than she has been taught to walk on two feet. She reacts badly.

That's kind of inevitable, once you've seen Solenn Heusaff's performance leading up to that, which is a no-holds-barred take on the wild child tope that's kind of impressive in that it still has a sort of fantastic authenticity despite the fact that she's got to play things a little more broadly than one might necessarily have to do in order to stay ahead of the rest of the cast, which isn't exactly being restrained themselves. It's an enjoyable physical performance, unabashed in its sexualilty - the filmmakers tend to treat shame and denial as worse than actual sexual activity - and always a nice complement to what Benjamin Alves is doing as Domingo, whether he seems earnestly smitten or casually dismissive when he gets home and decides it can't continue. He does a nice job getting between those states, too, not making it feel like a switch has been turned or like Domingo had been dishonest before.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Fantasia 2019.12: Ode to Nothing, Fly Me to the Saitama, and L'Intervention

You know what's in no way awesome? When your phone doesn't charge overnight or while you're working despite being plugged in, so it's not ready for duty when you head out for the festival. Luckily, there were no guests, or you'd be seeing how good the camera is on my five-year-old tablet, and I would look like a tool holding it up to get pictures. On the other hand, having that in hand rather than a device that could hook into a cell network reminded me how much I liked writing on it in distraction-free manner before getting the Chromebook. Maybe it's time to shake my routine up a bit.

Anyway, repeating from the last post, I'll be hitting Night God, Human Lost, and Koko-di Koko-da for sure, which seems light for a festival Friday, but maybe I'll reconfigure. Tone-Deaf is recommended.

Oda sa wala (Ode to Nothing)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

It is kind of hard to grasp the level of loneliness on display in Ode to Nothing at first. It's right out front, and is kind of clear that this is what the film will be about from the start, but people have to sink deep into a genuinely frightening desperation before the full extent of how it's eating at Sonya becomes completely clear, and that's when the filmmakers know that they can push the film somewhere else. They often course not to, but the audience still knows that a line has been crossed.

It's hard work at times, because this has to be a quiet film, spending enough time on isolation and scenes where little actually happens to show how you can be isolated even with someone else in the room, or how something else can skew your perception. The filmmakers build eccentricity into delusion in expected ways and then veer into other directions. It's surprising but not. Lead actress Pokwang pulls everything inside without seeming blank, and even her eruptions seem precise, as far as she can go without driving someone away.

Interestingly, the film never seems particularly interested in why Sonya is lonely; it doesn't necessarily matter, and giving a reason might just frustrate the audience for how the isn't being solved. Is just about being in that situation and seeing how it can drag a person down.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Tonde Saitama (Fly Me to the Saitama)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)

This may not be the most shojo movie possible (assuming I'm not being my manga categories mixed up), but it's right up there, probably only held back because it is so darn self-parodying that it has to get even more absurd lest it become mean.

Or maybe it is mean already and my Japanophilia is just not quite strong enough to recognize just how hard the movie is coming for what seems like any city or region anywhere near Tokyo. It's a non-stop barrage of jokes that seem like they should by and large be too specific to translate, but the filmmakers are good at doing the thing where such extreme specificity can get twisted into absurdity. I may not recognize the source of a particular gag, but I can certainly see how broad it is and how well executed.

And since these gags come roughly every fifteen seconds, there's a good chance that enough will land and make sense that most will laugh out loud a lot. The cast and crew are great at putting a kernel of humanity into their live-action cartoon characters (especially Fumi Nikaido as Momomi, whose decency surprises herself as much as anyone), and at the climax, such an all-out assault is mounted that is hard not to laugh at something, so long as the brain doesn't just shut down from overload.

Overload can be a problem, and I suspect that there's a certain amount you need to know even with how many jokes work regardless ("the name is written in hiragana!" not only doesn't translate at all, it's probably actively off-putting if you don't get it). But if you've swallowed enough Japanese pop culture, this is a real kick.

Full review on EFilmCritic

L'Intervention (15 Minutes of War)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)

From the subtitles, the English title for this film is "15 Minutes of War", which naturally leads to the question of what's going to happen for the other 80. The answer is a lot of simple competence, making for a very French take on the sort of military action film that, in American hands, often seems to be more likely to overflow with testosterone even when trying to be modest and self-deprecating.

On the one hand, that's pretty pleasant, at least as military action movies go. This film is procedural, spending a fair amount of time on working out tactics, arguing with other groups on the scene and command back home in Paris, just in a somewhat less shouty manner. Another thread plants an American schoolteacher in the middle of the hostage situation, giving the filmmakers plenty of chances to check in and make sure that the audience knows what the stakes are. It doesn't do much to illuminate what is going on with the hostage-takers, for better or worse; there's no need to make them sympathetic, but it wouldn't be unusual to dig a little deeper into what the issues around the situation are in what is ultimately going to be a bunch of European soldiers aiming to kill black people in Africa, though there doesn't seem to be a lot of moral ambiguity here.

The action is plenty strong, though, even with laying out what the plan is early on. It's concentrated in the last act (those fifteen minutes) and delivers a very satisfying combination of special-forces excellence and frightening chaos. The filmmakers know how to keep the adrenaline drip flowing, getting the audience caught up enough in what's going on that it's easy enough to dismiss that, yeah, the French seem to be scoring a bunch of head shots while the Somalis hit the ground near people's feet a lot.

It is this sort of movie, even after all, if it seems less gung-ho than usual. It's what it says on the box without a lot else, but a pretty good version of it.

Full review on EFilmCritic